(See a description of the #433rds project here.)

April 3

em-endations

I finish a good book coasting on a triad of virtue: relieved and exultant and—because most endings tilt down in an elegant droop—sad. When a good show ends I’m just embarrassed. I get goosebumps. It’s involuntary like a blush, and I do tamp them down, but there’s a cost to that, a long flatness of response that needs time to rise more sensibly, like dough.

Then come the giant notions, ungainly as jet-sized grasshoppers: Is Doll and Em the Key to Friendship? I’ve never liked Amish friendship bread very much: too saccharine an offer, too broad and glad a hope. But there goes my brain, haplessly baking, hunting and pecking. I’ve spent today wanting to tear off pieces of this show and mail it to people in plastic bags for them to ferment in their kitchen corners. (With a note: Grow it into Dolls of your own!) It’s so weak, isn’t it, to feel passionately about a tv show? Weaker still when you’re forced to say. Explaining why without explaining why (oh my Doll) means tailoring the chills out, and that’s delicate mathematical business and my feelings are more like wasps hurling themselves at the front window. Hard to coax a swarm like that.

Populate your life with scenes from a show: at night you write about this show instead of your day because you spent it panicking quietly because good shows bleach out their borders until they get translucent and bleed through because they give rise to fantasies (did I tell you I got a digital pen?) like maybe, if I write exactly the right thing, I can punch through, put the cold shoulder on ice, make an offer. Hard to see Caliban liking Miranda, but let’s drink in a hot tub wearing old photos, see if the thing develops.

(See a description of the #433rds project here.)

April 2

my grain

When a gray day breaks out of its dark
and toasts into a warm brown spot
the moves seem safer. But then you sprout
new lenses.
They open too wide
no matter how fast the shutter snaps
and down it all goes like a squall in porn, like soup.

(See a description of the #433rds project here.)

April 1

the gossip

Sir Thomas Browne’s friend described him as “answerable to his name”. He meant his hair and complexion were brown. (Get it?) The friend in question was named—it seems worth mentioning—Mr. Whitefoot. Thomas kept warm, though he wasn’t excessive about it—Mr. Whitefoot reassures us that “he never loaded himself with such a multitude of garments, as Suetonius reports of Augustus, enough to clothe a good family.”

I might describe a friend of ours as a lincoln log cobra or maybe harder and shinier: a fluorescent sequoia. It’s a bad description. It lacks Mr. Whitefoot’s hot-under-the-collar anxiety. It’s not defensive or competitive enough by half. It evokes nothing. (Remember when you listed your friends’s mimickable behaviors while we ate banh mi? The ones you might mimic if you mimicked? You remembered the hands and the angles of their squints.)

Thomas had a good memory. He “remembered every thing that was acute and pungent” about the Latin poets, Mr. Whitefoot says.

He, Thomas, blushed uncontrollably (according to Whitefoot).

Samuel Johnson didn’t know Thomas, but he wrote his biography, and it’s affably barbed. He, Samuel, thought Thomas’ writing on things like ancient burial practices was unhelpful but self-aware: “Of the uselessness of these inquiries, Browne seems not to have been ignorant.”

Browne liked the number five.

I’ve forgotten the names of the two actresses of Broad City, but Annie blogged about their show today.

(Thanks to Samuel Johnson, I worry about blog posts:

“Some of the most pleasing performances have been produced by learning and genius exercised upon subjects of little importance … it is a perpetual triumph of fancy to expand a scanty theme, to raise glittering ideas from obscure properties, and to produce to the world an object of wonder to which nature had contributed little. To this ambition, perhaps, we owe the Frogs of Homer, the Gnat and the Bees of Virgil, the Butterfly of Spenser, the Shadow of Wowerus, and the Quincunx of Browne.”)

I introduced Annie’s Broad City post to my friends with a story about Amy Poehler told by her friend. Amy Poehler produces Broad City, which is about two friends perennially describing each other to each other. It made me think of how Tina Fey describes her friend Amy Poehler in Bossypants. Amy Poehler did something Jimmy Fallon found obnoxious. When he said he didn’t like it, she turned to him and hissed, “I don’t fucking CARE if you don’t like it.” My friend Heather remarked that it was the only really risky thing in Tina Fey’s book. She’s right. Amy Poehler’s qi lives in that description.

I’d like to think six degrees separate the Broads from the Wife of Bath, with time measured in shoes. Broad, narrow, spiked. Push harder and your white feet ache, squeezed into the cisternae.

For the month of April, my pal beenepon and I are doing a project called #433rds.

1. At 3 pm every day, no matter what you’re doing, stop for a sec and take a photo. Doesn’t have to have any aesthetic value whatsoever—it’s just a record. Post on Instagram.
2. At some point during the day, take 30 Bananagram tiles and arrange them into words as fast as you can–3 minutes or less.
3. Write something that day based on those two inputs. (Or, if you’re feeling Cage-y, don’t.) Ideally, you’ll use all your words.

April=4  plus  30 Bananagram tiles  plus  3 minutes to arrange them  =  433rds.

(We came up with this one boozy night during a hard-core Bananagrams match when our respective Bananagrams turned out sort of dream-like. They seemed like accidental x-rays of our days. Feel free to join—hashtag #instabanana for the bananagram thing, #433rds for it all.)

Day 1
Day 2
Day 3
Day 4
Day 5
Day 6
Day 7

Day 8
Day 9
Day 10